


Haul

by twoofdiamonds



Category: Original Work
Genre: Awful English Motorways, Developing Relationship, Driving, F/M, Fantasy, Masturbation, Minor Character Death, discussion of fanfic, hot Sicilian men, story telling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:53:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25363432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoofdiamonds/pseuds/twoofdiamonds
Summary: "Because you’re my Aramis." He really is.
Relationships: OFC/OMC
Kudos: 1





	Haul

She’s driving the van. It’s a bit like the other time fifteen years ago when her husband-to-be had been too young for the insurance. There’s a new man beside her now, this overwhelming Sicilian man who has become her entire world while she wasn’t paying attention. ‘Boyfriend’ isn’t the word and ‘partner’ sounds strange but since she’s driving all his belongings up north and they’re _moving in together_ it’s more appropriate. Age isn’t a problem this time but he hadn’t been allowed to hire a van in the UK anyway, thanks to the suicidal half of the population who had voted for Brexit.

“This is boring,” he says.

She snorts a laugh and rolls her neck for the dozenth time. “I’m driving here. You’ll have to do the entertaining.”

“Tell me a story _capitana,_ ” he insists. “The music is too loud, it’s giving me a headache.”

She turns it down to a background hum. There’s nothing great on the radio anyway, weekend shows are always pop charts and golden oldies. The pop charts they can both do without, although some of the golden oldies are okay. “It’ll be a gay romance,” she warns, “With juicy bits. It’s all I’ve got.”

“That’s fine,” he says, slanting her that contented dad-smile that she just can’t get over. Her insides turn to goo every time and it should be impossible to live this way, in a constant state of melt. “Tell me one about Aramis,” he says, warming to the idea.

“Because you’re my Aramis.” He really is. Sometime in her thirties she had fallen way down the fandom rabbit hole. He has more than a passing resemblance to Aramis, it’s the facial hair. It’s also how she got herself into this situation. “Okay. I read this one story recently about Aramis with Porthos- ”

“Are you going to be Porthos?”

“Well no actually. Most of the story has Aramis and Porthos as a couple, and Athos with d’Argtagnan of course, but then there’s this surprising scene at the end where Aramis and Athos are in a van together- ”

“Very appropriate. So you’re Athos this time?”

“If the shoe fits.”

He reaches across and puts his hand at the back of her neck. “I suppose you are grumpy. And sometimes I think you drink too much whisky.”

His touch is electric but she mutes her exhale. She’s too old for this shit. “I am so fucked up over you,” she mumbles, forcing herself to concentrate on the road. “Anyway, Athos drinks wine, not whisky. Wine or brandy. He’s French.”

“French people drink whisky too you know.”

“Not in the sixteen hundreds.”

“I bet they did.”

“Well Athos didn’t!” He squeezes her neck and she can’t prevent the, “Ugh,” that escapes.

He gives her another squeeze and stretches his shoulders. The novelty should have worn off by now but it’s so hard to stop looking at him. He’s simultaneously the handsome dad-type and also the most beautiful being to ever walk the earth. She keeps expecting to wake up. Possibly she died without realising. “So they drove a van?” he says, “Doesn’t sound very exciting.”

“It was a tow truck actually. And the language was _beautiful_ ,” she says fervently.

He makes a rude, “Pfft,” sound, which is rich coming from a writer who has been known to wax lyrical about multi-page descriptions of architecture.

“So anyway,” she says, “Although they’re just friends catching a ride together, Athos kind of challenges Aramis to get his cock out.”

“Ah, now that’s more like it.” He grins. “Are you asking?”

“What? No!” She’s hyper-aware of the blood rushing to her face, “We’d get arrested.”

He laughs. “You’re so English.”

She glances at him but he’s just sitting there obediently, listening. “They were on their way to rescue the others,” she continues. “I think it was set in America in the 70s. Anyway, Aramis puts on this unexpected show for Athos. It isn’t described much in the text but somehow you can imagine it really well.”

He nods, looking thoughtful. 

“And they arrive at the place where they’re meeting their other halves before they’ve had time to… _recover_ properly.” She thinks about why that part of the story had stayed with her. “It was the shamelessness of it that made it memorable, I think,” she says. “There was no guilt, just unadulterated hotness.”

“Also because it featured Aramis,” he says knowingly. “What if I covered myself with your coat?”

“No! You mustn’t. I was just trying to pass the time, I didn’t think you’d- ” The sound of his zip fly is unmistakable, and lust surges through her. It feels like falling from a great height. “Oh holy fuck. Sal, seriously, I will crash the van and kill us both, I’m not kidding.”

“Keep telling me the story.”

“There’s no more story! That was the story.” The traffic slows and to her horror they enter a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. It feels like a catastrophe. she had known it was there and forgotten about it; at least half the motorways seem to be fifty these days.

His hand rises and falls, shifting the fabric of her raincoat at moderate speed. She can _smell_ his arousal.

“Oh God.” It’s difficult to sit still, knowing that he’s touching himself right next to her. She jiggles in the driver’s seat, shooting glances in his direction. “I might not make it,” she says fatalistically. She shifts her grip on the wheel and changes it back again.

“Stop being melodramatic.” His voice is rougher, just a touch, only noticeable to someone who has learned the difference and paid close attention in class. She’s never paid closer attention to anything in her life.

“I’m serious!” She taps the wheel and bites her lip, acutely aware of his eyes on her. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“I’ll tell you a story now,” he says lazily, in his thick Italian accent, “About a little lady who gets fucked in the back of a van at a service station.”

“There’s no room in the back of the van.” The weight of traffic slows them to thirty. “Shit,” she touches her head to the wheel. “And now it’s twenty minutes to the next services.”

He slows his hand. “Then there is time for a longer story,” he says, smiling lazily. She looks up worriedly at a passing lorry but the driver isn’t interested in them. “When I was young in Sicily I had been ill, as you know. When I got better I went out walking.” He thinks about it. “Because it was good to be alone I think. On sunny days the mornings are best, and in spring there are flowers, that kind of thing. You can walk out right to the end of the _capo_ ; a couple of hours.”

The sky above them is grey, heavy and threatening drizzle. She sighs. “We’re all mad living here.”

“Yes.” He tilts his head towards her like a cat, and she can’t resist reaching over to tuck a lock of hair behind his ear. “It is sunnier in Sicily but not perfect.”

“I know.”

“There was a girl in our town called Vittoria, older than me by a year or two. She was strange.” He pauses to consider this. “No, not strange, just different. Pretty though. She had a reputation for being easy. One morning she was sitting on a rock at the edge of the sea, like she was waiting for me.”

Rain drops begin to fall on the vast windscreen and she sets the wipers to slow, wincing. “Welcome to the North,” she mutters. It’s easy to imagine him on the coastal path, young and free in the cool morning of a hot day. And it’s hardly her fault that he ended up on this miserable northern island but she still feels guilty.

Rain patters on the van, louder than it would sound in a car. It’s more like being in a tent together. “I like the rain,” he says.

“Yeah, me too sometimes, but it’s nice to get a break from it now and then. Did you sleep with her?”

“Yes. But let me tell it nicely okay?”

“Okay.”

“She knew my name and invited me to sit with her. We didn’t talk much but she took off her shoes and put her feet in the sea, so I did the same. I couldn’t stop thinking about how sexy she was. She wore a very small dress and we sat close together.”

He closes his eyes and moves his hand again under the cover of the coat. She wants to ask to see but reticence keeps her silent.

“Her legs were long and pale,” he recalls, “And very smooth. She laughed when she saw that she had made me hard and led me up the hill, away from the path. There were sheds, not safe to go in but we went behind and they hid us from the path. Just holding her hand made me excited. I was very young.”

She tries to imagine him so young, without even the triangle of hair beneath his lower lip that had been his only facial hair in his thirties. It’s impossible to imagine him with short hair. She wonders if he had been softer in his youth, like every cliché about angels walking amongst us.

“She had very short hair at the back,” he says, “I liked how it felt in my fingers. She put my hands under her dress and there was only the dress, nothing underneath. No knickers, no bra.” He smiles at her raised brow. “She was young and slim,” he explains, “She didn’t need a bra. Her breasts were like buds, swollen but tight.”

“That’s…”

“Hot? Yes. I stroked the buds with my thumbs and they, how do you say, grew swollen?”

“Yeah.” She swallows. “That sounds about right.”

“Her hair was longer at the front and it fell in her eyes. She had hazel eyes. The way she touched me was very soft. She took my shirt off and gave me many light kisses, like she loved me, but we didn’t even know each other before.”

He picks up the pace with his hand, and she squirms her hips, wishing they were elsewhere, anywhere she could touch him, or at least watch him properly.

“Because there were no knickers I touched her easily. She was wet on my fingers and I’d never even kissed a girl before, so she knew I wouldn’t last long. It was easy to just pull down my shorts and she sat on my cock, taking me inside her cunt. It was my first time.”

She experiences the thrill of alarm she feels whenever he wields profanities so casually. She worries her lip and waits for more.

“I didn’t have a comparison then but she was very wet, very loose, so I didn’t come straight away. She rode me and it was good, so good, despite the sharp pebbles underneath me.” He hums, working himself faster with intent. “There was just her body, and the sun and the sea. I thought I had found Heaven.”

She pictures them, a tableau so exotic and far removed from her own experience that it could only be a movie, and a subtitled movie at that. She looks at him for as long as she can without risking an accident. There’s colour high on his cheeks and his heavy brows are knitted in concentration.

He opens his eyes and catches her looking, eyes heavy-lidded and drunk on pleasure. “I’m going to come now.”

“ _Oh_ ,” her thighs tense in sympathy. She needs to bring her hands to her face but can’t release the wheel, so she makes a soft sound that’s almost a sob instead, just for the release.

She tries to watch his face and the road at the same time. He makes only the softest noises as he comes, all the more beautiful for forgetting to make a show of it. When he’s finished he sighs happily and looks smug in a way that should be illegal, eyes crinkling delightfully. “Do you have any tissues?”

“Should have thought of that before, shouldn’t you?” she says, but gestures to her handbag. “You’re in luck.” What she really wants to do is offer to clean him up, preferably with her mouth, but they’re not really there yet. Instead she says, “I hope it didn’t go all over my coat.”

“No?” he says sheepishly, bundling the coat in a ball and squashing it into the footwell.

She laughs. “I’m going to need that.” The rain has started to fall more heavily and she switches up the windscreen wipers to make her point.

“You can wear mine.”

“Mmmm.” It’s a lovely idea, that she can be wrapped in his clothing. Her limbs have gone languid with arousal and she feels amazed all over again that this is her life. “Where is Vittoria now, do you know?”

“Ah.” He flicks through the radio stations but they’re all playing the news report. “She went missing, after I left.”

“Missing? Didn’t they find her?”

He turns to the window and breathes gently on the glass. “They found her body,” he says, tracing a heart shape in the misted area.

She looks at him, shocked. “My God. What happened?”

He shrugs. “She died. On the other side of Siciliy, along the west coast there are big cliffs. They found her near _la Scala dei Turchi._ Not at the tourist area, further along. They say she threw herself off. It was almost ten years later though,” he adds quickly, “A long time after we did it.”

“Was she pregnant?”

“Nobody said so. But they called her names, she had a reputation.” He wipes the drawing away with the sleeve of his sweater but a ghost of it remains. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“No.” She forces a smile and takes his hand. “It was a beautiful story. Thank you. I’m just sorry, about what happened to her.” The broken dead girl lies on the rocks in her imagination, agitated by the sea, another Ophelia lost to the world. Vittoria’s body wears the small dress from the story, and in her mind’s eye it’s bright with tiny flowers. 

After another mile or so a welcome blue road sign appears, warning ‘Tiredness can kill.’

“Let’s get a coffee,” she says, flipping on the indicator one-handed for the slip road.

“You don’t drink coffee.” He kisses her hand and sets it back on the wheel.

“Maybe it’s time I give it another try.”

**Author's Note:**

> The beautifully written story she mentions is Dandies In The Underworld by fiertedubearn


End file.
